Werewolves (2024)

There is a moment in Werewolves, roughly when the supermoon rises and the molecular biologists begin barricading a Puerto Rico-shot suburb, when a viewer may sense the absence of a message. The film has no message. It has werewolves. One year after a lunar event activated a dormant gene and killed nearly a billion people, the moon returns, and the survivors return to their traps and their cages. Frank Grillo plays Wesley Marshall, a former Marine turned scientist, who spends the runtime trying to get home. The screenplay treats this as sufficient. It is, more or less.

The cast is more textured than the budget would suggest. Katrina Law, Ilfenesh Hadera, Lou Diamond Phillips, and James Kyson fill roles that could have gone to anyone, and nothing in the script pauses to congratulate itself for the arrangement. The women fight, shoot, and survive with the same grim competence as the men, which is to say the film extends them the courtesy of not explaining them. Dr. Amy Chen wrestles a werewolf for dominance in a convenience store aisle. Lucy Marshall defends a fortified house with a shotgun. Nobody delivers a speech about any of it. This is a low bar, and the film clears it by simply not tripping.

What remains is a tight little time passer, to borrow Variety's phrasing, schlocky and unapologetic, with a Rotten Tomatoes score hovering near the midpoint of all human endeavor. The transformation effects are practical where it counts. The final confrontation, in which Wesley turns and then unturns with the sunrise, is resolved by astronomy instead of argument. In an era when even creature features arrive with a thesis stapled to the press kit, this one arrives with claws and very little else. We can classify it as harmless. We cannot classify it as much of anything.